Heavy Tiny
Sontag Shogun
Maya Nguyen
Elastro hosts a wonderful lineup for their July edition. We’ll have visiting duo Sontag Shogun, local duo Heavy Tiny, and a solo performance from Maya Nguyen.
Sontag Shogun is the collaboration between Jesse Perlstein and Jeremy Young. It is the piano-less form of their acclaimed trio, allowing them to break from song-form and recontextualize the space taken up by voice, field recordings, tape loops and tones and how those elements can move from soundscape to melody to noise and back again. They pull from the practices of music concrete, improvisation, experimentation and foremost, a fluid conversation in their collaboration. Sontag Shogun [duo] performances are always unique in their make-up and their product...never sounding quite the same way twice.
Heavy Tiny is a small dense thing, bigger inside than out. It is a diorama of the outside of the room that we’re in. Heavy Tiny is field recordings, synths, walkie talkies, found objects, Nick Meryhew and Lia Kohl.
Multidisciplinary artist Maya Nguyen will be presenting How many rocks can you eat before you turn to stone? This is a performative sound essay for pop rocks, rocks, stones, stone statues, petrification, rigidity, and frigidity.
$15 / $10 w/ Student ID - Tickets Available at the Door
Artist Bios
Maya Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Russian interdisciplinary artist with a focus on sound performance, found-object interventions, and diasporic making. She gathers speech fragments, urban recordings, body movements, migratory routes, sounds imitating nature sounds, household objects, and videos of daily encounters into open-ended works.
MN has a BA in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from University of Chicago and an MFA in Sound on a full scholarship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited at Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (Hanoi), UCLA New Wight Gallery (Los Angeles), Manzi Art Space (Hanoi), Berlin Art Week 2024 (Berlin), World Forum For Acoustic Ecology 2023 (Florida), Internationales Digitalkunst Festival 2022 (Stuttgart), Watershed Art & Ecology (Chicago), and elsewhere. Recently she was artist-in-residence at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (Berlin) and Saari Residency (Mynämäki, FI), winner of Karl Sczuka Radio Art Research Prize 2024 (Munich) and Arts Club of Chicago Fellow 2025-26. Her next project is an upcoming solo show at Jack Straw New Media Gallery (Seattle).